Hello again, badmoviephiles. I am back with a new review!!! This time, I'll review the epitome of Superheroes played by the late Christopher Rerve. Yup, Superman. Now I am reviewing things from all the s-man movies he's played the lead role in. In my opinion, Christopher was the best of them. But in my opinion, Superman was the most ridiculous fictional character in history. Because nothing that Superman does can ever be possible in real life by any means. I'll be covering a few of those.

Earthquake triggered by a missile This was in the first film. A missile which was hijacked by Superman's arch rival, Lex Luthor smashes into the San Andreas fault triggering a series of Earthquakes. This is impossible. First off, the missile itself was a standard ballistic cruise missile, not a nuclear one. It smashes into a weak point in the San Andreas fault line triggering those earthquakes intended to sink California. Even if you did that, those Earthquakes wouldn't happen. Why? Because trying to trigger earthquakes with a single ballistic missile is like knocking down the whole Empire State Building with a basketball. It just doesn't work. Earthquakes are caused by the motion of the techtonic plates under the surface and when they hit an obstacle, a tremor happens. Nothing mankind can do will push a techtonic plate into motion. Sorry guys.

How S-man stops the Earthquakes. What does Superman do to stop the earthquakes? Does he halt the shifting of the techtonic plates? Nope. He seals the San Andreas fault by going under the earth and pushing a single boulder in place. That is pointless. Even if you could seal the San Andreas fault, it would just crack again. That would never stop earthquakes from plaguing callifornia. What will stop earthquakes from plaguing california? Oh, just the same thing that will stop earthquakes all over the world. But it won't happen for a few billion years, The Earth's crust thickens and all its techtonic plates fuse together. This will happen long after all life on Earth is extinguished.

Superman reverses time Ridivulous, ridiculous, ridiculous. Superman finds Louis Lane, the love of his life, dead. Struck by the grief he feels, he flies up into orbit and flying faster than the speed of light against the Earth's rotation, he reverses it. Not only does he reverse the Earth's rotation, he reverses time! This is ridiculous on every level. First off, you can't reverse the Earth's rotation by flying around it at the speed of light. If Superman wanted to reverse the Earth's rotation, why didn't he just cling to Mountain Everest and push it eastward? Also, reversing the Earth's rotation would have been far more catestrophical. It wouldn't reverse time and it would have done a lot worse than making the sun rise in the west and set in the east. The atmosphere would create terrible windstorms which would knock everything down as it was still following the Earth's original rotation. Is it possible to change the Earth's rotation? Sure it is, wait a few billion years. 4 billion years ago, the Earth rotated much faster than it does today. A day was roughly 12 hours long. In 2 billion years, a day will be 36 hours long and 2 billion years after that, 48 hours long. Yes the Earth's rotation is slowing down. But will it come to a complete stop? Not likely. By the time it does, the Sun will have gone through its natural cycle and incinerated it.

Heat and X Ray vision These are things we see in both the first and second films, Superman using Xray vision and General Zod, Ursa and Non using heat ray vision. These things are biologically impossible. I mean in order for these things to happen, they would have to have radioactive isotopes in their brains generating these powers and these would make Superman very dangerous to be close to. Anyone close to him would die of radioation sickness.

Super-breath This happens in Superman II. Our hero is knocked unconscious by a flying van. The people think he is killed. They turn on General Zod, Ursa and Non to try and lynch them. But how these three keep the lynch mob away is laughable. They use their super-breath to create a storm to keep them away. This storm lasts for several minutes! They don't take a break to inhale again, they just keep blowing and blowing like their lungs have infinite capacity. Ridiculous. Even if you could blow a superbreath, it wouldn't last anymore than a few milliseconds before you needed to inhale again.

Kryptonite What is this stuff and why is it deadly to Superman? Allegedly its made up of the fragments of his homeworld of Krypton. If this Kryptonite was so deadly to him, then why didn't it kill the populace of Krypton before its sun went nova?

Superman makes a diamond out of a piece of coal I know what you're thinking, diamonds are made of pure carbon so this is possible. Yes, its possible. But the problem is Superman made a 1 karat diamond out of a piece of coal that was less than half a pound. He wouldhave needed a lot more coal than that to create a diamond of that size. In reality, that little lump of coal would have created a diamond that was microscopic in size.

Superman stops Mount Vesuvius eruption This is laghable and ridiculous/ Mount Vesuvius is erupting. Superman flys in to the rescue to stop it. What does he do? Simple, cuts off the crest of a nearby mountain and uses it to cork Mount Vesuvius. This wouldn't stop Vesuvius from erupting, it would just turn it into a bomb! You see, the eruption would continue in spite of the obstacle. Extreme pressure would build inside of the volcano until BLAMMO!!! You get an explosion twenty times worse than hiroshima. No more vatican or papacy!!!

Bombs in da Sun!!! In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, the s-man takes all the world's nuclear stockpile and where does he dispose of it? In a black hole? Nope. Out in a far away galaxy beyond the reach of man? You wish! What does he do? Throw them in the sun! Bad idea. I mean, sure the sun is 500 times bigger than the Earth. Well we have enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world ten times over. So imagine what they would do to the sun. The Sun is a nuclear engine, yes a nuclear FUSION engine. Nuclear missiles work by nuclear fission, quite the opposite. So if you threw several hundred nuclear missiles into the sun, it would start a chain reaction which would ultimately destroy the sun, and Earth!

"Don't mess with the S!"Sorry, but I already messed up your twisted fantasy.

Later badmoviephiles.

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Babe, I'm leaving. I must be on my way. The time is drawing near. The train is going. I see it in your eyes. The love beneath your tears. And I'll be lonely without you. And I'll need your love to see me through. So please me. My heart is your hands. And I'll be missing you...

To be fair, Superman reversing time by flying around the Earth very nearly ruined the first film for me.

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"The basic plot is that Donna Speir and Hope Marie Carlton, the two undercover DEA agent Playboy Playmates from the last movie, are still running around in jungle shorts, cowboy boots and spaghetti strap T-shirts, firing their machine guns at drug smugglers, Filipino communist guerrillas, and corrupt federal agents while their two friends, Lisa London and Miss May 1984 Patty Duffek, lounge around the pool a lot and talk on speaker phones that look like fax machines."-Joe Bob on SAVAGE BEACH

What killed it for me was Margot Kidder. Seriously? Lois Lane was supposed to be desirable, right? I mean, Margot Kidder, even back then, was a notch and a half above Eileen Brennan on the hotness scale.

« Last Edit: May 11, 2010, 05:43:09 PM by Flick James »

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I don't always talk about bad movies, but when I do, I prefer badmovies.org

What killed it for me was Margot Kidder. Seriously? Lois Lane was supposed to be desirable, right? I mean, Margot Kidder, even back then, was a notch and a half above Eileen Brennan on the hotness scale.

That's kinda true, Flick, but no matter what you think of her looks, you can't deny that she was awesome in Black Christmas - for me that was the true defining moment of her career.

And Wyrewizard my man, sometimes suspension of disbelief can be a good thing.

« Last Edit: May 11, 2010, 06:48:10 PM by voltron »

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"Nothin' out there but God's little creatures - more scared of you than you are of them" - Warren, "Just Before Dawn"

To be fair, Superman reversing time by flying around the Earth very nearly ruined the first film for me.

It brings up so many questions. Chief among them, why doesn't he reverse time on Krypton a few years, then beat the crap out of Brainiac and prevent its destruction? Yeah yeah, yellow sun vs red sun and all that jazz, but they don't really mention the sun stuff in the original Superman film.

It's probably the most unbelievable event in any superhero movie yet made, and that is saying something.

Edit to add:

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What is this stuff and why is it deadly to Superman? Allegedly its made up of the fragments of his homeworld of Krypton. If this Kryptonite was so deadly to him, then why didn't it kill the populace of Krypton before its sun went nova?

It's a weak explanation, but in the comics at least, Krypton wasn't actually made out of kryptonite - instead, when it exploded, chemical processes converted some of its material into kryptonite. And the actual similarly named chemicals are not related in any way - the element in DC comics is purely fictitious and might as well be magic. Did you know Superman is also weak to magic? Funny, but true.

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Well we have enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world ten times over.

It depends on what you mean by destroy. If you mean wipe out humans and most complex life, yes. But we couldn't really physically blow up the earth, we'd be doing minor damage to the crust at best.

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Nuclear missiles work by nuclear fission, quite the opposite. So if you threw several hundred nuclear missiles into the sun, it would start a chain reaction which would ultimately destroy the sun, and Earth!

Why? The bombs aren't going off (and even if they were, I fail to see why this would cause a "chain reaction". A chain reaction of WHAT?), and they're just made out of plutonium and metal - in reality, they'd simply be destroyed by the heat of the sun, long before they actually made contact. It'd just be lumps of matter being absorbed into a gigantic ball of gas.

I agree with Jim on the nuclear missiles - tossing them into the sun wouldn't do anything.

The Mount Vesuvius thing is kind of funny to think about. I don't believe you could chop off the top of a mountain and then carry it somewhere - it would collapse into a pile of rocks and dirt. And even if you did have something that big and heavy, putting it on top of an erupting volcano would probably be a horrible idea. You've got all that pressure of the magma and gas under the volcano, and now you've added a bunch of pressure on top of it as well. I'm thinking you'd have pyroclastic flows incinerating everything for miles in every direction.

« Last Edit: May 12, 2010, 06:33:18 AM by Jack »

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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Hello all, new posting here though I 've been reading the forum a while. Actually, I'm one of those people who can't ignore laughable science errors in the movies though I still love cheesy science fiction. The errors just crack me up. Had to say that you were doing great on pointing out impossible stuff but ran right off the road on the last one. The sun is a MILLION times the size of earth. When earth falls into the sun in 5 billion years the sun won't even notice, like putting a speck of dust in Vesuvius. So nuclear weapons would make far less impact.

When your movie stars a guy who's bullet proof and can fly just because the sun is a different color where he's from, nitpicking the scientific errors is kinda missing the point.

You might as well complain that Bugs Bunny shouldn't really be the same size as a human and be able to talk. And where does he get all that dynamite? And why doesn't it actually kill anyone when it blows them up?

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The scientific impossibilities are only noticeable if a movie tries to take its whole premise "seriously" like the ridiculous "Core" or " Armageddon" . Cartoons obviously don't. Superman and lots of others do. Actually Armageddon was fun despite being preposterous.

The scientific impossibilities are only noticeable if a movie tries to take its whole premise "seriously" like the ridiculous "Core" or " Armageddon" . Cartoons obviously don't. Superman and lots of others do. Actually Armageddon was fun despite being preposterous.

Agreed on Armageddon. Absolutely ridiculous, but good fun. Armageddon worked because it didn't take itself too seriously. I mean, they even reference Wile E. Coyote when discussing some of their maneuvers.

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The scientific impossibilities are only noticeable if a movie tries to take its whole premise "seriously" like the ridiculous "Core" or " Armageddon" . Cartoons obviously don't. Superman and lots of others do. Actually Armageddon was fun despite being preposterous.

Word on the Core script is the main writer of it wrote is a secret satire on the modern disaster film. Makes sense if you look at the science angle - virtually EVERY SCIENTIFIC SCENE IN THE FILM, as well as all the disaster scenes, is completely preposterous.